Author Charles Dickens might not have been the doting husband and father many thought he was.

Author Charles Dickens might not have been the doting husband and father many thought he was.

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Charles Dickens: a tale of two fathers

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For his 200th birthday, the ghost of Charles Dickens is rubbing his eyes in disbelief, wondering at the attention his admirers are giving his children and his mistress. As Michael Slater writes in his new book, "The Great Charles Dickens Scandal," "One of the main things that Dickens represents in our culture is an ideal of perfect, blissful, quintessentially English, domesticity. … For over seventy years the vigilance of, first, Dickens himself, and then, after his death, of his immediate family, managed to keep scandalous rumour pretty much stifled, thereby maintaining his highly bankable image as not only a supremely great writer but also as a truly good and pure man."

In 1858, Dickens, whose fiction for more than two decades had entertained millions of readers while awakening them to the social injustices of British laws, announced in an open letter that he was essentially putting his wife out to pasture. Catherine (nee Hogarth) Dickens had borne him a dozen children (nine of whom survived infancy), and before the scandal was hushed up, a contemporary newspaper blasted him: "This favourite of the public informs some hundreds of thousands of readers that the wife whom he has vowed to love and cherish has utterly failed to discharge the duties of a mother; and he further hints that her mind is disordered. If this is 'manly consideration' we should like to be favoured with a definition of unmanly selfishness and heartlessness."

Dickens slandered his wife so effectively he was able to banish her from his home and take custody of their children - under the primary care of her younger sister, who in fact had long helped raise them - and regain the public's regard. Less public was that Dickens had commenced an affair with an 18-year-old actress.

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Robert Gottlieb, in his kindly biographical survey, muses over and sympathizes with the unfolding lives of Dickens' children, none of whom made an independent mark on the world. Dickens' "great expectations" for them petered out by the time they were adolescents: "Certainly, their lives, however unfortunate, were far from disgraceful and would attract no opprobrium (and no attention) if they didn't have the Dickens name attached to them."

When they were tykes, he was delighted with them, and with his usual creative spark, also attached extraordinary and marvelous nicknames to them (among them, Lucifer Box, Young Skull, Chickenstalker, Skittles, the Ocean Spectre, the Jolly Postboy, the Plornishgenter). He had a hard time, however, once it was clear they possessed neither his artistic genius nor keen ambition: "I never sing their praises because they have so often disappointed me."

More Information

'Great Expectations: The Sons and Daughters of Charles Dickens'

By Robert Gottlieb

Farrar, Straus and Giroux; 246 pages; $25

'The Great Charles Dickens Scandal'

By Michael Slater

Yale University Press; 215 pages; $30

Gottlieb sums up one of the pieces of the novelist's case against his humiliated wife: "How could it not be her fault that his children lacked his overwhelming energy; how could they not be attacking life with his own implacable determination - how could they not be eager to 'hew out their own paths through the world by sheer hard work'?"

Coincidentally or not with his disappointed expectations of his wife and children, Dickens became infatuated with Ellen Ternan, of an acting family and set her up in a house in London. In his lifetime, his children seem not to have known why their parents were separated or what Ternan was in relation to their father. They would figure it out later, and, following Dickens' friends' policy, keep quiet about it, in spite of the possibility that Ternan had had one or two children by dear old Dad.

The truth

When Dickens died in 1870, Ternan was the first named beneficiary of his will, but by then there was enough British defense of their "national treasure" that even halfway through the 20th century his torchbearers denied that Dickens and Ternan had had anything but a platonic relationship. Ralph Fiennes' movie about their affair, "The Invisible Woman" (based on biographer Claire Tomalin's book of the same title), scheduled for release next year, will lay out the scandal before countless viewers.

Despite terrific sleuthing on the part of amateur and professional readers - restoring deleted sections of letters, tracing his travels and Ternan's whereabouts through registries and decades-later interviews of people who knew people who knew them - we still don't know the relationship's most telling gossipy details or much about Ternan. We know she later married a clergyman and taught school, and had two children with her husband.

In his quiet, careful and patient manner, Slater, a Dickens scholar, unfolds "the excitement in the media and elsewhere concerning the gradual uncovering of the great secret of the last twelve years of Dickens's life." Sometimes Slater seems to rue all the nosy fuss, but he happily tracks down and assesses the tiny accumulating pips and squeaks of the "scandal" just the same.

Gottilieb, meanwhile, restores us to the more interesting thoughts about what it would mean to be a celebrity's offspring: "It cannot have been easy being a child of the man who was not only the world's most famous writer but the world's most beloved writer, and probably the best-known person in the nation apart from the Queen. And it certainly was not easy being caught in the viral family atmosphere after Dickens eliminated his wife from his life and to a considerable extent cut the children off from their mother, whom, despite his disclaimers, they also loved."

Whatever expectations they had of themselves, they were continually aware of their disappointment to everyone else. "The children of his brain," Gottlieb quotes Dickens' son Charley, "were much more real to him at times than we were."

Bob Blaisdell edits literary anthologies for Dover Publications. He wrote this review for the San Francisco Chronicle.